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Insights into Essay and Letter of Recommendation Storylining

It’s easy to get super focused on your GMAT and forget about the GMAT only being about 25% of the battle. Your essays and letters of recommendations are where the admissions committee actually gets to know you as a person. They want to understand not only what you have done, but why what you did matters and what motivates you to do those things. Here are some tips on how to make sure you are telling your best story that will resonate with the admissions committee.

You need to make it clear that you’ve done X, learned Y, want now want to do Z, and this specific MBA program is the platform you need to achieve that!

This is so important we are putting it here again – What is your reason for wanting to get an MBA?
Why and MBA and why now? Do you want to change careers? Change industries? Do you want a diverse network of people from all over the world? Do you need a specific skillset and the MBA is the best way to get it? This needs to be clear in your essay and also short answers about career goals (short and long term).

Tell a story no one else can tell
The admissions committee is literally going through thousands of applications and they want to find people who stand out. You may think well I have a career hundreds of others in this pile of applications also has, so I’m not unique. Wrong! You may be coming from an industry where hundreds of people apply to the same schools, but the things you learned personally and professionally and your reason for applying an MBA program are uniquely yours.

Think about times where your perspective shifted greatly. Maybe this was living abroad. Maybe this was working with someone that really challenged you. Maybe this was almost changing jobs but deciding to stay. This list could go on forever, but the main point is think about experiences that were vitally important to your personal and/or professional development and why this matters to the MBA admission committee.

Weave in your research about the program
When you are thinking about your application to each program think about what you heard about from students or alumni and what you saw in your online research. What are the schools core values? What are experiences you’ve had where you can demonstrate those values without saying them outright? What organizations, professors, applied learning, or other aspects of the school are you most excited about?

Letters of recommendations are vital to your application
These letters provide a second and third opinion on what you’ve done and learned personally and professionally. A good letter of recommendation confirms your story. A great letter of recommendation makes the admission committee want to talk to you. There are a few strategies to letters of recommendation (trade offs between prestige of position of person writing and someone who knows you really well), but in the end the following are really important:

Have coffee, tea, or a quick meal with your potential recommenders to help them understand why you are applying to MBAs, their responsibilities as a recommender, and ask them if they would commit to being a recommender
If you have recommenders who have worked on the same team with you, make sure they don’t tell the same story ask them to coordinate and differentiate
Choose recommenders who are reliable and will submit on time
Choose recommenders who will tell your story